A very special evening with Jacques Tati

Last friday I went to a special event around Jacques Tati work at the great Forum des images. Tati made one of the most important movie of the 20th century (yes, it's that important) with Playtime, his masterpiece, far, far more important than his most famous films Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Mon oncle and Jour de Fete. I'm not going to list all the elements in Playtime that mean so much to me - the unique sense of graphic design and architecture, his view of a futuristic parisian lifestyle -, you should get this book - everything is here, and the movie is on DVD. No, I'll instead focus on that Friday evening because in many ways what we saw was quite unique.
Introduced by one of the Playtime book author, and presented by french film director Bruno Podalydes we witnessed the first ever lecture of Tati's last (and lost) project, Confusion (1982), and what we heard (and almost, saw) is a beautiful movie.

Tati describes in Confusion the same world as in Playtime, a futuristic city (Paris) where activity is centered around pictures and communication - advertising and television. Monsieur Hulot is gone, and a young man is starting his job at La Com, working on ads and TV programs to modify them, enhance their message. It's a visionary project, and like Playtime it shows a mature author: his goal is not to make us laugh like in his early works, but to make us think about our obsessions with (moving) pictures, office work, television, communication and political messages. This could have been his greatest movie, but already, in this script form it's an amazingly creative and fascinating project. Tati was a visionary: 20 years after, his vision is our reality, the world we are living in. People are trying hard to understand and use technologies, and as with every Tati film, they fail, provoking mistakes, errors and unexpected consequences. This is also why Tati is important, for this right to make mistakes, a right to divert technology. We miss his vision.